Amid the hum of Woodcat Coffee in Echo Park, Azniv Korkejian pauses in front of a wall of family photographs mounted on faded construction paper and tucked into repurposed frames. She points out her mother in a stylish red minidress, knee-high socks and black platforms, posing playfully in a photo studio after getting her hair done in 1970s Beirut. Nearby, her parents — Armenians raised in Syria and Lebanon — appear young and glamorous in the coastal city of Latakia in Syria, before war scattered much of their family and long before their daughter began recording music as Bedouine in Los Angeles. Korkejian hung the images at the neighborhood coffee shop run by friends as a small, offline extension of the personal mythology captured on her new album, “Neon Summer Skin.”
The family photographs preserve the past and also showcase a different perspective of her culture. People from West Asia are so often shown through images of violence, Korkejian says, that their joy, style and ordinariness can disappear from view. “There was a lot to lose,” she says. “There was a lot of beauty in those lives.”
Bedouine’s fourth studio album (out now via Thirty Tigers), emerged from an equally personal impulse to preserve what was vanishing. Its origins reach back to a 2019 visit to Saudi Arabia, where the Syrian-born Korkejian spent the first 10 years of her life. Her family moved to the United States in 1995, but her parents returned to Riyadh after she left home for college. Now her father was preparing to retire, and the couple began quietly packing for a move to Armenia. Only gradually did Korkejian understand that she probably would not be coming back.
For the singer-songwriter, Saudi Arabia was her last anchor to childhood. With Syria transformed by war, Lebanon unstable, and Armenia an ancestral homeland in which neither she nor her parents had ever lived, the move left her without an obvious place to return to.
“ When I’m there in Saudi Arabia, I just revert back to a kid,” she says. “I felt so taken care of. I imagine that’s maybe how people feel when they go back home for Christmas. And I felt like that was being taken away from me.”
The lush, searching songs on “Neon Summer Skin” began as an attempt to preserve the feeling that the “village-like” place of her childhood had given her: safety. But in the years it took to make the record, Korkejian came to understand home less as something inherited than something made — and in turn, herself as the person now responsible for making it.
After returning from her final visit to Saudi Arabia, Korkejian wrote album opener “On My Own” — a piano ballad cradled by a quivering Mellotron as a full band gradually gathers around her. For a while she was unable to play it without crying. Rather than retreat from the reaction, she took it as a directive: “There’s something I need to sit with here,” she remembers thinking. “There’s a task at hand.”
The COVID-19 pandemic gave Korkejian the stillness to undertake it. A mantra took hold — “ She had nowhere to go, so she went deeper inside herself” — and, for the first time, she began writing within a defined emotional framework. Where her previous albums largely drew from a cache of material accumulated across years, Korkejian set out to explore her feelings about her family, their experiences together, and the meaning of home.
“ I think those parameters are really liberating personally. There’s a kind of conviction and exciting confidence that comes with writing about something so personal,” she says. “Even though it was, in the same breath, really sad and kind of devastating. But it felt like my story to tell.”
Amid the pandemic’s stop-and-start days, Korkejian would sometimes step outside after showering and let the sun dry the water from her skin. The sensation returned her to the perfect childhood day at the pool: being dragged from the water after hours of play, wearing a swimsuit covered in bursts of neon and tiny gems, deliciously unconcerned with how ridiculous she might look.
The memory, and the blissful obliviousness it conjured, became the image at the center of the title track. It also helped Korkejian understand that she wasn’t attempting to interrogate or re-create memories — her recollections were too fragmentary for that — but to capture and preserve the feeling within them.
“When I tried to dilute it into the purest essence,” she says, “it felt like safety.”
On “Neon Summer Skin,” that feeling is not only remembered but sonically rebuilt, rendered in lush, vividly textured arrangements. Though the ache of nostalgia reverberates throughout, the songs remain intensely present and vulnerable in their reckoning with it. Korkejian’s finely observed lyrics move among sensory flashes, family histories and a poet’s intuition for detail — the blood of a lamb staining a wedding dress, the sound of brothers roughhousing in the hall — giving emotional form to memories that resist orderly narration.
Bedouine, whose self-titled debut was released in 2017, has long centered Korkejian’s honeyed contralto and fingerpicked guitar, but the new record surrounds them with softly layered keyboards, percussion and brass alongside adventurous rhythms, its tactile details bringing each revelation startlingly close.
Korkejian sourced many of those sounds from instruments she first picked up as a child, returning to the trumpet — her second instrument after piano — and experimenting with tuba and valve trombone. Some of those early overdubs survived into the finished album with longtime co-producer (and now husband) Gus Seyffert.
The album’s most direct act of preservation began not in the studio, but during a takeout run while Korkejian was visiting her brother and nephew in Houston. Korkejian was driving with her mother, who was recounting details of her childhood, when Korkejian realized she was struggling to retain them. She placed her phone between them and began recording.
When Korkejian’s mother was 7, her own mother placed her in an orphanage on the Lebanese coast to protect her from her father. She remained there until her early teens, yet never understood the decision as abandonment, Korkejian says. Korkejian’s grandmother visited faithfully, and the distance between them remained charged with love.
Spoken in a colloquial mix of English and Armenian, the recording became the introduction to “Canopies,” a song with the hushed, rocking cadence of a lullaby that Korkejian wrote from her grandmother’s perspective. In it, she imagines the sacrifice of loving a child enough to send her away to keep her safe. Over an instrumental break, her mother’s recorded voice recalls the words her grandmother would call from a balcony in Beirut. Korkejian translates it as: “Waves, waves fold over, and send her scent to me, from the rugged cliffs of the Mediterranean, to the bars of my balcony.”
Korkejian considers “Canopies” and the title track the twin hearts of the album: two portraits of childhood safety rendered in radically different forms. Where “Neon Summer Skin” locates it in the invincible abandon of a day at the pool, “Canopies” finds it in the paradox of protection through separation and the bond capable of surviving it.
Korkejian completed “Neon Summer Skin” before she became pregnant, when its questions about children and family were still speculative. She was, she says, “in between families”: no longer able to inhabit the one her parents had made for her, but uncertain what shape the next one might take.
The feeling was familiar among her Los Angeles peers, many of whom had spent their 20s and 30s prioritizing other ambitions while delaying, whether by choice or economic necessity, conventional markers of adulthood. Korkejian, too, spent much of those years traveling and keeping herself light on her feet. Settling down demanded a different form of agency.
Home, she eventually realized, is both chosen and made. Someone cooks the meal, buys the flowers, hangs the art and puts on the music. Someone creates the rituals that make an ordinary room feel safe. “It’s like art,” she says. “You have to make something out of nothing. We actually have more control over that than we think.”
The realization, captured in “One Thing Right,” was both liberating and intimidating. The family Korkejian had inherited began with two people choosing each other; now she, too, could decide whom to fold in and what to build.
Korkejian’s daughter is 2 now, and in the midst of what she calls an “intense dad phase.” She gives her mother pushback or tells her to go away. Korkejian reads it as its own sign of trust: Her daughter can test the boundaries because she feels safe enough to do so.
“‘You might not want me here, but I’m here. It’s my job to keep you safe,’” Korkejian says. “It feels like my biggest privilege and honor and responsibility to create that feeling for someone else.”
Motherhood has clarified what was still an open question when she began “Neon Summer Skin.” Only in retrospect could she see that the permanence she mourned had never been fixed; it was a world her parents had continually worked to hold in place.
Now that work is hers. “I’m the one that gets to create the sense of home now,” she says. “The baton has fully passed.”
The post Bedouine turns lost homes into lush refuge on ‘Neon Summer Skin’ appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
